Director, Sense About Science USA, which advocates for an evidence based approach to science and technology and for clinical trial transparency. Editor, STATS.org, a collaboration between the American Statistical Association and Sense About Science USA. Visiting Fellow, Cornell University. I have written about data and statistics and how they are interpreted in our so-called "knowledge economy," especially in relation to risk and regulation. I've written for the New Yorker online, Harvard Business Review, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. I speak regularly about the media's coverage of science and statistics and scientific communication. Educated at Trinity College Dublin, Georgetown, and Columbia.

2/24/2012 @ 1:15PM244 views

New York Times Tipsy Diarist Calls For Booze Crackdown

Every columnist, from time to time, strains against the absence of a deeper meaning in the daily events upon which they are called to opine; but few have herniated reason so desperately in the service of a column as the New York Times’ Frank Bruni, who manages to extract a call for increased taxation out of Whitney Huston’s death.

Huston did crack cocaine, and – as she memorably told Diane Sawyer in 2002 – “crack was wack.” But, as Bruni observes, Huston was apparently as fond of the bottle; so, why isn’t vodka wack? Why isn’t beer wack? After all, even if alcohol didn’t contribute to her death, alcoholism is a huge problem.

Why, he asks, do people tut-tut over drug abuse but not alcohol abuse, or – OMG, genius! – why aren’t they calling for increases in the excise duties on alcohol to do something about it?

Okay, let’s key “alcohol “into Google News. At the time of writing, there have been 59,400 links mentioning alcohol in the past 24 hours. If the first page of results is anything to go by, we can’t stop talking about the problems of alcohol, including a heartwarming story from the Vancouver Courier about a program that helps chronic alcoholics stop drinking Listerine and hand sanitizer by giving them rum.

Oh wait, that’s in sensible Canada; in the good old censorious US, parents have been charged with serving drink to their kids, most recently in Chapel Hill, where for good measure the police charged the 17-year old daughter for taking the drink given to her by her parents too.

Bruni is living in a fantasy America if he thinks we don’t worry enough about alcohol. We worry so much we’ve fetishized it into the thing teens must have. Because if it’s this bad, it must be good.

And Bruni is living in a fantasy world when it comes to curbing harmful drinking through taxation. As researchers at Yale Universitynoted in an analysis of the impact of alcohol taxes on older people, the heaviest drinkers responded the least to price increases, while moderate drinkers responded the most. Moderate drinking, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently said (sotto voce, of course, so as not to offend the Puritans), is a “healthy behavior,” correlated with a longer life.

But it is possibly Bruni’s attempt to paint one-third of Americans as engaging in “risky” drinking that’s the most – um, what’s the word? – wack; for it means that one sip more than a standard glass of wine at a restaurant is “risky” for a woman (any more than two glasses, “risky” for a man). What happens if you clock an extra ounce at a bar? You are, apparently, on the path to addiction, violent crime, and death.

One can only wonder, how Bruni (or New York) survived the five years he spent (and spent and spent and spent) as a restaurant critic for the Times, where his policy on wine seems to have been, give the sommelier a budget and then drink whatever was served. And what about the “Tipsy Diaries,” where Bruni was paid to bar crawl for the paper every two weeks?

The phrase that comes to mind is that the lad “doth protest too much.” It’s one think to stretch Whitney Huston’s death into a call for higher alcohol taxes, it’s another to tax everyone else’s “risky” drinking, when your own was so heavily subsidized by The New York Times.

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